Ahead of a Red-Flag Economic Session

The LFB submits:The trading week will pick up momentum from Wednesday with a raft of red-flag economic releases scheduled to hit the wires, culminating with the Friday release of Non-farm Payroll numbers. Love it or loathe it, the market reaction to the NFP numbers has set the tone for each month of trade going all the way back to December 2009. The antiquated, disjointed, heavily-revised survey seems to belong in the back pages of a financial newspaper, rather than front and center of global market traded direction. However, the instant-reward, low-attention span world that we live in tends to feed well off NFP sound-bites, and like a slow-motion train wreck, it is hard to stop the momentum once it gets going.Complete Story »

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The LFB submits:Asian equity trade held support overnight, and although still dramatically oversold offered enough momentum to move S/P futures trade off the pivotal 1050 area. If global equities move higher ahead of the ADP U.S. employment numbers at 08:15 ET on Wednesday the USD will have a hard time getting bought. Oil traders moved WTI (West Texas Intermediate) off 71.50 support, in a move that was aided by positive overnight Asian macro-economic reads.

The LFB submits:Play: Latest Global Video Charting The reaction to better than expected U.S. Employment data on Friday was for equity trade to move higher, commodities to lose ground, and interest rate markets to be bought. In reality the NFP numbers offered a poor picture of the overall U.S.

The LFB submits:
Headlines
Anticipation of the Friday non-farm payroll release from the U.S. is building, and will likely contain currency movement within this week’s trading ranges. Trade desk updates have called for consolidation at support above 72.50 on the dollar index (DXY) (74.40) in the mid-term, and to monitor resistance at 76.50 very closely.
Outlook

If predicting yesterday's EURUSD (and market) reaction to the ECB announcement was easy enough, today's reaction to the latest "most important ever" nonfarm payrolls number (because remember: with the Fed getting out of market manipulation, if only for now, it is imperative that the economy show it can self-sustain growth on its own even without $85 billion in flow per month, which is why just like the ISM data earlier this week, the degree of "seasonal adjustments" are about to blow everyone aw

Cliff Wachtel submits: Together, the non-farm payrolls report and unemployment rate report USUALLY generate heightened volatility, especially in forex. We generally recommend that forex traders stand aside and not trade, but if you insist on trading the payrolls report, the simpler currency pair to use is USD/JPY because the EUR/USD reaction to the NFP release tends to be distorted by the dueling forces of fundamentals and risk appetite.

The Australian dollar drifted lower on Monday, weighed down by a combination of renewed geopolitical concerns on the Korean Peninsula and soft economic data ahead of the release of Australia's Q2 GDP report on Wednesday.
Here's the scoreboard as at 7am AEST.

TOKYO: Asian shares hovered close to 5-1/2-month highs on Thursday as oil prices showed surprising resilience partly on hopes that oil producers may eventually agree on a measure to ease a global glut. MSCI's broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan rose 0.3 percent while Japan's Nikkei gained 2.0 percent. Wall Street shares ended less than 2 percent short of a record-high close on Wednesday as a rebound in oil prices added to optimism sparked by a raft of earnings reports. The S&P 500 gained 0.08 percent to 2,102.4, and up 15 percent since mid-February.

TOKYO: Asian shares hovered close to 5-1/2-month highs on Thursday as oil prices showed surprising resilience partly on hopes that oil producers may eventually agree on a measure to ease a global glut. MSCI's broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan rose 0.3 per cent while Japan's Nikkei gained 2.0 per cent. Wall Street shares ended less than 2 per cent short of a record-high close on Wednesday as a rebound in oil prices added to optimism sparked by a raft of earnings reports. The S&P 500 gained 0.08 per cent to 2,102.4, and up 15 per cent since mid-February.

The LFB submits:Another day, another slow motion, automated, train wreck-type move in equity futures trade. The European futures trade was held in a 0.5% range for 15 hours on Thursday, and then, on cue, just as the closing bell rang across Euro-land the high-frequency trading algorithms kicked in and wrecked the best laid plans of buy-and-holders. The moves decimated the near-term Dax, FTSE, and CAC charts.

The LFB submits:Trading the OTC (over the counter) currency markets offers an opportunity to hedge stock and bond investing, but really is more of a traded market following the ebbs and flows of global commerce than it is an investment arena to plan retirement from.